Ponzi Factor | V-Log 4 | Tesla SEC Settlement

Hi, this is Tong. Thanks for joining me again. It's Saturday, and I needed to touch on this for you all. Long story short, the SEC settled with Elon after they said they were gonna go after him on Thursday.

I'm not exactly happy about this because this shows that there's a lack of enforcement. I've always been very, very resistant to this idea that there's lack of enforcement, because there's one thing if there's ignorance; I can educate people and show them that there's a difference between imaginary asset value and real money. But there's not a whole lot I can do when it's a blatant act of lack of enforcement. There's not a whole lot anyone can do, really, if it's just a blatant act of lack of enforcement.

So it's very upsetting in that sense to me that it's not so much about Tesla itself; it's about the fact that there's a lack of enforcement. This is a scam that they allowed to happen. They allowed Tesla to exist for eight years and let Elon print any five million shares while the value got Ponzi'd up. There are gamblers on both sides of this scam. Are they protecting, in this case, the bulls who owned the shares? Yes, yes they are. But what about the bears who saw the scam and looked at their books and said, "Hey, this company lost six point six billion dollars over the past eight years"?

They've printed seventy-five million shares. There is something very blatantly wrong here, and they should be out of business. Those people are also investors; those people are just on the other side of the trade. So when the SEC said they're protecting somebody, they're also hurting some other people too.

Look, at the end of the day, this is a gamble. You know what I said in my book; you know what I call the whole thing. But at the same time, I also tell people I don't care if you buy stocks after you read my book. I'm just trying to tell you how it works. If you want to buy stocks afterwards and you want to gamble, gamble to your heart's content. I don't care, as long as you know that it's a zero-sum game. As long as you know you're taking money from other people and you want to play that game, you go do that.

This is troubling because, you know what, within the gamble itself, there are supposed to be certain rules—certain forced rules. And this, however, is a breach of that. This shows that, hey, within the gamble itself, things really effed up can happen where literally the SEC can just see a very blatant documented scam and then look the other way or say, "You know what? We're doing something about it," and just not really doing anything about it.

So this is very, very sad. Very, very sad. The reason why the SEC thinks they're protecting investors here is because they're ignorant enough to think that Tesla's fifty billion dollar market cap is real money. Okay, it's not real money.

So I want to touch only on the seventy-five million shares outstanding that increased for a moment. Ignore the Ponzi factor; ignore the Ponzi value, all that stuff. I want to focus on only one element of the scam—and there are many elements—but the one element is the seventy-five million shares outstanding that no one seems to talk about.

First of all, Tesla's market cap is a result of Elon printing seventy-five million shares over the past seven or eight years. That market cap is BS. He printed his way to a fifty billion dollar market cap. He printed that crap out, okay? That is BS, and the SEC is trying to protect people from that BS.

Second of all, for the Tesla bulls who think that Elon has their interest, for the Tesla bulls and people who believe in stocks and think that their vote and their voice has some kind of relevance, it is BS. Okay, dude, there is no way anybody, anybody in their right mind can justify an argument for why a CEO will print seventy-five million shares and say it's for the benefit of its shareholders. It diminishes your voice—not that your vote matters anyway, by the way. The voting thing is a scam on its own.

But let's just assume it's not a scam, but guess what? Just holding seventy-five million additional shares just made that worthless voice of yours even more worthless. So guess what? This whole seventy-five million shares alone shows that Elon is full of crap when he says he has the interests of investors in mind, and it shows that the market cap for Tesla is garbage as well.

I really don't give a crap about Tesla at the end of the day, okay? I mean, the whole Ponzi factor, the whole Ponzi scheme itself goes deeper than that. But nonetheless, this is a serious problem if it's a lack of enforcement when it's something just blatant.

So now, with that said, though, Tesla is not out of the woods because this settlement with the SEC is kind of an admission of guilt as well. I know the legal jargon stuff basically says something about like not omitting, not denying, but yeah, it looks bad if he's settled with the SEC.

And the torrent of legal actions from a civil part that from people who are suing him—yeah, that's not over. That's still coming, and that's still pretty bad. And if Tesla is again running out of money as it is, I'm gonna leave you with, I guess, a positive note.

One funny thing about truth is it doesn't disappear. Okay? So Tesla's got all these promises. They've got civil suits lined up; they got whistleblowers. They have all kinds of stuff they have to deal with, even if they have settled with the SEC.

I think this guy put out the best tweet. He says: "Breaking news: both Tesla longs and shorts celebrate in unison after hearing Elon Musk will remain CEO." I will celebrate because Elon is not a good CEO. If he's a great CEO, then his company would be profitable, so I will celebrate this—that Elon is still CEO and onward another day.